


Torre Annunziata

by Naraht



Category: King Rat - James Clavell
Genre: 1940s, Crueltide, Gen, Italy, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 01:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2833658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Marlowe, still in his demob suit, bought a ticket at Victoria for the boat train.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Torre Annunziata

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



A man could not take back his humanity all at once, however many Allied rations and clean uniforms he was given.

Back in England, Peter Marlowe stepped off a troop ship - aging Union Castle liner battered beyond recognition by her war service - still gaunt, haggard, haunted, the new flesh sitting uneasily on the bare bones of his face as if it belonged to another man entirely. He was no longer starving but that was about all that could be said for him. He shocked himself more when he looked in the mirror now, because he had been reminded by the outside world what it was to be a man. To be a man who was not the King.

Though he had been scrubbed, shorn and disinfected, he felt the mark and the stink of Changi still upon him. He expected people in the street to stare, as the first men to liberate Changi had stared. He descended into the Tube with dread, thinking of slit trenches and wire netting. In the midst of the crowds on the platform he imagined rats crawling at the edge of his vision, down by the rails, waiting to take him back into their kingdom when he fell, as fall he must. (Even the King had fallen.)

But London never noticed. The city of which he and others had dreamt in their captivity was exhausted, grey, worn beyond belief, as if every memory which had fed the souls of desperate, dying men in a prison halfway around the world had been wrung from the life of the city itself. Piles of rubble stood where he remembered buildings. Passing faces were set and drawn as though endurance were all they could cling to. Rationed food, rationed coal, rationed hope - the leftovers of hope for the end of a war that had ended already, and left them with nothing.

Unlike most of the men in Changi he had been a career officer, but there was no future for him in the RAF. That had ended the moment he was taken prisoner, three years spent as a Lieutenant with no hope of advancement. He took his discharge when it was offered him. 

There was no need for him to find work immediately. He had a small inheritance from his father, whose ship had been sunk by a torpedo on the Murmansk run. He envied the cleanness of that death before remembering that he was still alive. 

But what was there for him to do? Whenever he heard talk about winning the peace and the welfare state, he shuddered, thinking of a government dishing out half cups of rice through all eternity. Not enough to live on. Just enough to keep body and soul together.

Peter Marlowe, still in his demob suit, bought a ticket at Victoria for the boat train and went to Italy.

***

Rome was full of men working out their own salvation. The first time he heard an American accent, moments after stepping off the train at Termini, he stopped and stared. After a few hours he didn't notice any more. Italy was crammed full of them: small time crooks, deserters, POW escapees who had never rejoined their regiments, Americans who weren't ready to go home. All Europe was bulging at the seams with refugees and the displaced, as threadbare and patchwork as the worn shirtsleeves and dirty collars of London. But Italy wore it better.

He'd intended to stay in Rome, insofar as he'd intended anything at all. But after a few days spent drinking cheap wine and smoking untaxed cigarettes - thinking that this was damn close to what, in Changi, he would have called heaven - the wanderlust caught him again. He took up his kitbag, went back to Termini, and got on a train to Naples.

Maybe he would go on forever. He thought of the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, Athens then on to Istanbul. Overland to Anatolia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush. The sweep of the Himalayas he could envision, having flown the Hump every week until he was shot down. _Cloud-capp'd tow'rs, gorgeous palaces... the great globe itself..._

As if Shakespeare had ever seen anything like it.

And where would it all end? Drawn on irresistibly to Burma, and thence to the Malay Peninsula and Singapore and Java, looking for... what? N'ai? The King? Absolution?

Strangely it was the thought of the King that brought him down to earth, suddenly hearing an old woman arguing with a young boy about the price of oranges on a small railway platform miles from anywhere. He flung a coin out the window hoping to stop the squabbling and flinched as both woman and boy scrambled for it, like a cigarette flung in the dirt. Once it would have seemed natural. Now his feeling of kinship was too intense. He was forced to look away.

Peter Marlowe sat by the smeared and dusty window, alone in the first class carriage, as the train shuddered and puffed its way through the ragged outskirts of Naples. Twilight was just beginning to fall and the bay spread slowly out before him as though a stage curtain were being unrolled. The sky was shaded with colour, dust borne on the wind from Africa. Vesuvius brooded over it all, solitary and distant, awaiting the day.

Change at Naples for Pompeii. He had thought that the train went all the way there. Perhaps it had once, but the area had been battered by Allied bombing raids. He was turned out of the carriage halfway to Pompeii, in Torre del Greco, by a railway porter whose indignant, unceremonious gesticulations told him that he would travel no further.

As well as warning him of the importunity of beggars, his ancient Baedeker noted that the city sat at the foot of Vesuvius and was periodically destroyed by effusions of lava. In his current mood he considered that this was as good a recommendation as any. He took a room at a hotel which had doubtless been 'first rate' around the time of his parents' honeymoon, and settled in.

Here too the black market was king. Peter Marlowe was an outsider; the old men making deals on street corners spoke a language he did not understand. But nowadays he could read the signs. Even if he could not, the offers in broken English followed him everywhere: whores, cigarettes by the truckload, antiquities despoiled from across Europe. He had hard currency. There was no other reason than that. If he had carried a sketchbook he might have been assumed to be an artist but they would still have made the attempt.

He admired this. Still. Changi had changed him that much. 

He told himself that he needed somewhere out of the way to recuperate but the truth was that he liked the place. The almost tropical intensity of the light. The constant life of the street, turning out of doors what in England remained impassively shut away from view. A crumbling vibrancy that London could never match. 

From the Torrese there was no suspicion. They knew what he was there for, or thought they did. But the longer he stayed, the more attention he drew from the other men who had drifted there in the wake of the war. Some of them had probably fallen off the back of a stolen Allied supply truck in 1943 and been there ever since. They had their connections, their games, their territory. He could only represent a threat.

Without the King he was nothing but they weren't to know that. Peter Marlowe spent his mornings sitting outside a cafe, smoking and watching the street, wondering how it would all end. Some conversations hushed now when they saw him; they knew he was an English speaker, that he'd already overheard the talk of shipments and payments and bribes. It amused him to be aware of it, though there was nothing he could do with the knowledge.

If it put him in danger... well, he thought he had forgotten how to live without danger.

About two weeks after he arrived, he decided to go to see the half-excavated Roman villa in the next town. There was still no train, so he walked; there was nothing else to do. He wondered whether he was being followed, then put the thought aside as absurd paranoia.

The site was above the town, with a view over the bay. It must have been a beautiful spot once, back when it had belonged to Nero's scheming second wife Poppaea. Baedeker told him that it had first been excavated in 1840, not by archaeologists but on the orders of Bourbon monarchs searching for loot, little better than grave robbers. There was little to see now; the place was deserted. 

After coming all that way Peter Marlowe could not bring himself to climb down into the tunnels. He stood looking over the bay, smoking a cigarette to steady his nerves and thinking about the eruptions that had preserved the villa for millennia. Changi would rot away in the tropical humidity. In fifty years there would be nothing to show that they had ever been there.

He could not bring himself to throw away the cigarette. Smoked almost down to the fag end, but a small bit of tobacco remained to be saved. He would save it; he always did.

Turning to go he saw the two men lingering by the gate. He knew they had come for him. It was about time.

"There's someone who wants to meet you," said one of them, a tall, sunburned Australian.

"Oh?" said Peter Marlowe, feeling almost giddy. "If you can arrange an introduction I'd be delighted. I'm always happy to make new friends."

"Don't be funny," said the other. Indefinable American, Midwestern. "Come on."

They had a gun, of course. He let them guide him through the narrow streets of Torre Annunziata, noting how none of the inhabitants would meet his gaze. These men were known here; he was not. Most likely he would simply disappear. The thought quickened his blood; at risk of death for the first time since leaving Changi, he felt alive.

"Do you think we ought to tell Milo?" said the American to his compatriot.

"Nothing to do with Milo."

The building was indistinguishable from any of the others on the street. Crumbling plaster so damaged that one could not tell whether the culprit had been war or the passage of time. Shutters closed tightly against the light. A threshold over which he was invited to step.

 _So, this is it,_ thought Peter Marlowe, not for the first time. How strange to think that after it all it would end with a bullet in Italy. He had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at the irony.

He blinked in the sudden dimness. The place was abandoned, a shell lit only by a kerosene lamp. There was one man waiting for him, who got to his feet as he entered the room.

"I thought you'd never come," said the King.


End file.
